The Doctor Whose Story Debunked Proof of Heaven

An individual's medical records are, for good reasons, as private and sacrosanct as the conversations that take place in confessionals. And so, during my first interview with Dr. Eben Alexander, after he told me he wasn't planning to make his medical records public, I asked if he would give me permission to speak to any of the physicians who treated him during his illness. He said I could speak to three of them: Dr. Laura Potter, the emergency physician who treated him in the ER at Lynchburg General Hospital, and Drs. Scott Wade and Robert Brennan, two infectious disease specialists who oversaw some of his treatment during his subsequent six days in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit. I emailed all three doctors. Dr. Brennan responded immediately, thanking me for the invitation but politely declining. Dr. Wade declined as well, though he did so indirectly, through Dr. Alexander, who emailed to tell me that Dr. Wade was "off the list," because he was too busy.

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Dr. Potter agreed to an interview.

When I called her, I didn't expect much new information. She and Dr. Alexander had known and worked with each other in the past. I imagined our interview might leave me with just a simple confirmation of Dr. Alexander's account of his hospital stay. But, as it turned out, over the course of two telephone conversations lasting approximately one hour in all, Dr. Potter would tell me things which undermined several of the core points in Dr. Alexander's bestselling book, Proof of Heaven.

I think it's important to note that Dr. Potter was not intentionally trying to undermine Dr. Alexander's story. Dr. Potter clearly admires Dr. Alexander, and like so many people who've encountered him, she was struck and somewhat intimidated by his obvious intelligence. At one point during our interviews, she joked to me that, "he's more of a thinker, I'm more of a knuckle-dragging worker." Dr. Potter is a busy parent and Ironman triathlete who saves lives for a living. She is so busy, in fact, that she had not had a chance to read Proof of Heaven prior to speaking with me. Which means that when she gave me her account, she did so without realizing that it contradicted Dr. Alexander's.

The following section is a short excerpt from "The Prophet," my profile of Dr. Eben Alexander. It outlines the crucial differences between Dr. Alexander's account of his illness and Dr. Potter's.

By the way, the first paragraph of this excerpt is a reference to Dr. Alexander's claim, detailed earlier in the article, that a relentless hard rain had fallen during his entire week in the hospital, breaking only on the morning of his awakening, when the Lynchburg sky was graced by "a perfect rainbow." For the rest of the story, I recommend reading the entire article. Thanks. — Luke Dittrich

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Dave Wert, meteorologist in charge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office that encompasses Lynchburg, reviews the weather records for the week of November 10 through 16. "There was nothing on the tenth," he says. "Nothing on the eleventh...two hundredths of an inch on the twelfth." The next three days, he says, were rainy and miserable. Then the storm appeared to break on the evening of the fifteenth. The sixteenth was another clear day.

Could there have been a rainbow on the morning of the sixteenth?

"No," he says.

Unlike weather records, Alexander's medical records are all confidential. Alexander does not plan to make them public, though he did offer to allow three of the doctors who treated him to speak about his case. Two of them declined the opportunity. The other, Dr. Laura Potter, was on duty in the ER of Lynchburg General Hospital on the morning of November 10, 2008, when the EMTs brought him in.

Both Alexander in his book and Potter in her recollections describe Alexander arriving in the ER groaning and flailing and raving and having to be physically restrained. In Proof of Heaven, Alexander describes Dr. Potter then administering him "sedatives" to calm him down.

Here's how Dr. Potter remembers it:

"We couldn't work with Eben at all, we couldn't get vital signs, he just was not able to comply. So I had to make the decision to just place him in a chemically induced coma. Really for his own safety, until we could treat him. And so I did.... I put him to sleep, if you will, and put him on life support."

After Alexander was taken from the ER to the ICU, Potter says, the doctors there administered anesthetics that kept him in the coma. The next day, she went to visit him.

"And of course he was still in an induced coma," she says. "On ventilator support. They tried to let him wake up and see what he would do, but he was in exactly the same agitated state. Even if they tried to ease up, a little bit even, on the sedation. In fact, for days, every time they would try to wean his sedation—just thrashing, trying to scream, and grabbing at his tube."

In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he spent seven days in "a coma caused by a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis." There is no indication in the book that it was Laura Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that induced his coma, or that the physicians in the ICU maintained his coma in the days that followed through the use of anesthetics. Alexander also writes that during his week in the ICU he was present "in body alone," that the bacterial assault had left him with an "all-but-destroyed brain." He notes that by conventional scientific understanding, "if you don't have a working brain, you can't be conscious," and a key point of his argument for the reality of the realms he claims to have visited is that his memories could not have been hallucinations, since he didn't possess a brain capable of creating even a hallucinatory conscious experience.

I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated state that Alexander exhibited whenever they weaned him off his anesthetics during his first days of coma would meet her definition of conscious.

"Yes," she says. "Conscious but delirious."

Potter hasn't read Proof of Heaven, although she did get an advance look at a few passages. About a year after his recovery, Alexander approached Potter at a track meet that both of their sons were competing in and told her that he'd started writing a book, and that he wanted her to take a look at some parts in which he described her thought processes in the emergency room. He wanted, he said, to "make sure that you're okay with what I've done." He later e-mailed the passages to her, and when she read them, she found that they were "sort of what a doctor would think, but not exactly what was going through my head." She told him so, and according to Potter he responded that it was a matter of "artistic license," and that aspects of his book were "dramatized, so it may not be exactly how it went, but it's supposed to be interesting for readers."

One of the book's most dramatic scenes takes place just before she sends him from the ER to the ICU:

In the final moments before leaving the emergency room, and after two straight hours of guttural animal wails and groaning, I became quiet. Then, out of nowhere, I shouted three words. They were crystal clear, and heard by all the doctors and nurses present, as well as by Holley, who stood a few paces away, just on the other side of the curtain.

"God, help me!"

Everyone rushed over to the stretcher. By the time they got to me, I was completely unresponsive.

Potter has no recollection of this incident, or of that shouted plea. What she does remember is that she had intubated Alexander more than an hour prior to his departure from the emergency room, snaking a plastic tube down his throat, through his vocal cords, and into his trachea. Could she imagine her intubated patient being able to speak at all, let alone in a crystal-clear way?

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